Integrating Pentaho/Talend/etc. with an OR Mapper

Question

We have an application (Java) with an own OR mapper. Within this system we have what can be compared to Hibernate's interceptors (we call it triggers): Do specific actions just before saving data in the database, after it's deleted and so on. The underlying database is MySQL.

Now we would like to use tools such as Pentaho Data Integration or Talend to convert data to put it into our system. It's no problem to do that directly on the SQL level, but by doing so we loose the built-in power of our triggers.

Is there a way to somehow integrate any of the Data Integration solutions into our existing application? It would be great if there was a way to write into instances of our classes instead of writing into the database directly.

Any hints welcome :-)

Answer 1

2 ways with Pentaho data integration I can think of straight off:

1. Simply create a plugin which adds/deletes data - you could copy the existing salesforce insert/update plugins, they would be a good start - rip out all the salesforce code and replace with yours.

2. Perhaps harder; But maybe more satisfying - Write a jdbc driver which uses your code!

Answer 2

I'd prefer Talend which is a Java code generator tool. (You can se my blog post at http://www.robertomarchetto.com/www/talend_studio_vs_kettle_pentao_pdi_comparison)

You could use a tJavaRow so you can write Java code for each processed row. In tJavaRow you can call Hibernate code, for example using a custom class defined in a new routine.